THE BIG TEASE!Cryptic intel about this week’s episode, titled ”Confirmed Dead.” (Ominous, huh?) The second installment of Lost’s fourth season was written by Cloverfield scribe Drew Goddard and comic book superstar Brian K. Vaughan. I give you a line of their dialogue, taken from the final scene of this terrific, mythos-expanding, can’t-wait-to-talk-about-it episode:

”What is the Monster?”

D’oh!

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THE LOST CHEAT SHEET SEASON 4, EPISODE 2: ”CONFIRMED DEAD” What you need to know before watching. (Useful context? Coy clues? Pudding? Not even my editors know my secret truth!)

”FIND 815” An online story set within the Lostverse chronicling the mysterious maritime adventure of an ex-Oceanic Airlines employee whose girlfriend was a flight attendant on Oceanic 815. Convinced his lover might be alive, Sam Thomas booked passage on a salvage vessel and set sail for the South Pacific; look (and listen) for the boat to get name-checked in the first three minutes of this week’s episode. ”Find 815” (and by extension Lost) was ingeniously promoted via product placement in Marvel Comics titles like Fantastic Four. Might I be singling out the Fantastic Four because their mythos might explain something about this week’s episode? Of course I am.

COMIC BOOKS Minor Lost fixation; major Doc Jensen obsession. Upon boarding Oceanic 815 in Sydney, Hurley tossed Walt a Spanish-language superhero comic called Faster Friends, in which Green Lantern and the Flash were abducted by aliens, placed in an alien zoo, and fought polar bears. It was later tossed in the bonfire and destroyed. Qué lástima!

RAY PARKER JR. ”When there’s something strange in your neighborhood…whoyagonnacall?” ”GHOSTBUSTERS!” Could I be anymore cryptic? Of course I can! To wit:

DE-TERRITORIALIZATION Fancy anthropological word found among the annotations jotted upon the blast-door map; used in a reference to the Island’s polar bears. I could tell you what it means, but I would need to understand it first, and that ain’t happening. Apparently, the indigenous intelligence has been recontextualized if not relocated — some might say re-territorialized — by the alien cultural force that is Lost.

ANNIE Ben’s best friend from his younger Dharma days. At some point, she disappeared. Maybe she died in the Purge. Maybe she became a guinea pig in a Dharma time-travel experiment. Kinda young for Ben, though, don’t you think? Creepy bastard.

THE HYDRA STATION Zoological facility where the Dharma Initiative conducted experiments on polar bears, sharks, and dolphins. Its logo resembles the mythological ”hydra,” a monster with many heads, all of them vaguely snaky.

PRINCE CASPIAN The sequel to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the second book in the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis; soon to be a major motion picture. In Prince Caspian, those wascally Wardrobe kids return to Narnia via a small island threatened with invasion by menacing marauders known as the Telmarines. After waking up in a thicket, the children celebrated their enchanted homecoming by splashing in the surf. They might have pulled a Hurley and did a cannonball dive into the surf, but you know how those uptight Brit types are. So reserved.

NEXT PAGE: Jorge Garcia sits down with the Doc to talk about Jacob, the flash-forwards, and whether Charlie was really just a hallucination